Problem
I wanted to print a booklet, i.e. “print a document two pages at a time ordered in a way that folding the whole printout would produce a booklet, half the size of the paper which could be stapled in the middle.”

How to do it? Adobe Reader can do this but I had no luck. It seemed that it created the booklet correctly but when I printed it, the pages were flipped on the long side instead of the short side, so the result landed in the dustbin.

Solution
There is a nice little software called PdfBooklet that can create a booklet PDF that you can then print. Just open the original PDF in PdfBooklet, make sure that the ordering is OK (it should be), then click on the “Go” button to create a new booklet PDF. PdfBooklet didn’t show all the pages correctly in its view pane but the produced output was OK.

If you use Ubuntu 13.10+, you won’t find Adobe Reader in the Software Center. Instead, download the .deb file from http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/ and install it. In my case it complained about the state of the package but I chose “install anyway”.

The easiest way is to open the downloaded .deb package with the Software Center. First I tried to install it from .tar.gz, but when I tried to launch it, it didn’t find some library.

Fine, but… What if you start a process normally and then you realize after a few minutes that it won’t finish soon. Stop it and restart it with one of the aforementioned two methods? No. You wait until it stops and if you are not at the computer, you won’t have any idea how long it was running. Damn!

Is there an easy solution for this problem? A painless, straightforward way? Well, yes, there is. See below.

Solution #3 (the easy way)
In bash, you can customize the prompt via the PS1 variable. By default, its value is set to something similar:

“IFTTT is a great service that enables users to connect different web applications (e.g., Facebook, Evernote, Weather, Dropbox, etc.) together through simple conditional statements known as “Recipes”.” (via wikipedia)

IFTTT stands for “ifthis then that”. That is, if a condition is met, then an action is triggered.

Here is a nice introductory video. It shows how to get an SMS if it’s going to rain tomorrow:

Let’s see another example. Say you have a favourite TV show that you want to watch as soon as possible. When the new episode is out, you want to get an email notification.

As reddit user ACreatureVoidOfForm pointed out, we need Showrss.info and ifttt.com. “Create a page on showrss for all the shows you watch and generate an RSS feed. Create a rule on ifttt to email you when a new entry is added to the feed.” (tip from here)

Problem
I have a favorite TV show whose new episodes I want to watch as soon as possible. However, I don’t want to keep in my mind the release dates. When a new episode is out, I want to get an email notification.

Solution
At http://next-episode.net you can check out the release dates of the episodes (example). LetterMeLater provides a service to send emails at a specific date and time (it’s free up to 30 emails/month). To the release dates I added one day and set LetterMeLater to send emails at that day.

It may not be the best way to do it. If you have a better method, let me know.